I am not a fan of patents - they cost a lot, allow for patent trolling and slow things down.
My thought for today is that increasing number of patents is a symbol of postindustrial, prototype culture in technology where the real winners are lawyers - in a healthy society, the real moats to business would be better manufacturing which is famously orders of magnitude more complicated than prototypes. Since barely anyone builds new machines that build new machines, we are left in a culture which puts moats in form of patents.
